IF I CAN'T FILE, NEITHER CAN THEY

At times when you are feeling low it can be generously comforting to discover that those folk whom we esteem, have the same clay feet as the rest of us. That is one of the reasons I enjoy reading diaries - indeed why I enjoy blogging, I suppose. Mind you finding that other people share the idiosyncratic sentiments and silly failings that previously you thought belonged uniquely to you can be mildly disconcerting. After all one doesn't really like to entertain the possibility that the world may be run by people who are just as dippy as oneself.

I remember being fascinated the first time I opened Alan Clark's diaries. I was staying somewhere in the Cotswolds at the time, it was a summer's afternoon and I was feeling a little bored. The book with its lush green cover beckoned from the bookshelf and in no time I was transfixed, utterly transported into the Clark world - a mix of high life and low politics, of hypochondria, insecurity and sheer raciness.

Alan Clark lived in a castle in Kent and somewhat to his chagrin - for I think he imagained himself as a kind of Emperor manqué - was a junior Minister in Mrs Thatcher's government. His diaries are full of indiscretions and shenanigans, many of a sexual nature, but they are very good fun and also wonderfully well written.

It helped that I had been in government - though on the civil service side - for some of the time at least that he wrote about. From the cramped confines of the civil servants' box I too had felt the magic of the Commons Chamber, trod the corridors, been treated in the bars. Some of the characters he mentions were people I knew or at least had met.

I also knew something of politics, of writing, of the northern county of Sutherland where the Clark family had a croft. We shared some elements of a common background. And yet I must have been by far and away as different a sort of member of the human race as you might expect to meet. I had no time for his political sentiment or his whinging, his lies or his lack of feeling for others less fortunate than himself.

But it is when he is acknowledging his temptations and weaknesses that you realise that he has the same clay feet as other people. When, for instance, he writes conspiratorially about making a diary entry in a meeting, of recording his thoughts rather than the substance of the discussion, I am an instant collaborator. 'People assume you are making notes, ' he writes - and this is true. How often have I done this myself?

Or when, as on 8 September 1983 he writes about his paperwork 'I am at my desk…..absolutely drowning in estate papers. Filing piles and Immediate piles and Pending piles are stacked haphazard on top of each other. I try to differentiate by stacking them criss-cross, like bricks, but I caught some that were sticking out with my sleeve and the whole Pisa-like tower collapsed, cascading the private and personal papers all over the floor.' I know exactly what he means; I could have written much the same. Though not in a million years his next sentence: 'So what? I haven't picked them up. I just walk on them.'

I was prompted to recall Alan Clark's attitude to filing by a piece by Jane Shilling in Times2 that caught my eye this week. At the instigation of her editor she has been trying to spend a few days stress free according to principles advocated recently by Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, the cornerstone of which seems to be ditching that awful taskmaster, the To Do List.

Freed from its clutches Jane sets out to tackle jobs put off for too long. There's the growing pile of unread newspapers kept against the possibility of their containing some vital scrap of information. And then, 'the almost equally large pile of unanswered correspondence and the nasty slithering heap of filing barely contained in a cupboard out of which it threatens to burst at any moment. They gnaw at my conscience like sin.'

'My own admin,' she writes, after opening the cupboard and listening to the radio about a scientist who sorts out his paperwork at 4am, 'is a debilitating sight, strewn all over the floor, but I round it up into an assortment of tidy sub-heaps and go off to Pilates, which I've never done before.'

Here, then are two very different people, writing 24 years apart. Both are having the same problem - a problem moreover, that I can relate to utterly and completely. For I have 'sub-heaps' arranged on almost every flat surface, bulging cupboards, tottering piles. They, talented and successful as they may be are no better at it than I am. This is truly a wonderfully comforting feeling.